sábado, 23 de enero de 2016

A NEW GUEST

These latter days we´ve been bombed with lots of news about a new planet discovered in the outer zone of our solar system. A planet that we´ve been seeking for decades, but so far, nobody has been able to demonstrate that it exists.

In fact, scientist haven´t seen it directly but by measuring gravitational pulling forces on other known bodies called Transneptunian objects.

Is not the first time that this "Planet x" has been introduced to mankind, but this time, it seems to be thousands of data abailable. At least, mathematical models seems to confim its existence. However, the discovery won´t be recognised untill it is observed directly, and this is going to be a big challenge because the huge distance and because the amount of sunlight that it receives is extremely dim.

As you can see in this orbital diagram, so distant planets as neptune are all inside the little green circle with the sun in its center, and the orbit of the possible new planet would be in red colour.

If maths don´t fail, it would take 15.000 years to make a turn around the sun, so we could say :

1 "Planet X" year = 15.000 Earth years

To understand in a correct way all these data and to be conscious about the magnitudes we are talking about, lets imagine that our sun is a nut in the middle of "Catalunya Square", in the center of Barcelona.

The orbit of an outer giant planet as neptune would be out of the square, maybe in the next two or three streets. The new planet would have its orbit on the outskirts of the city, so if finally this discovery were confirmed, the size of our solar system would increase incredibly.

If you are stunned with all these data, I have to tell you that they are extremely insignificant if you compare it with the big distances between stars. With our current technology, we are leaving right now in an unmanned spaceship our solar system,(the former one) beyond Neptune orbit, and we have taken just over 40 years to reach that distance (5.000-7.000 million km).

Can you imagine how long it would take to go to the nearest star, Proxima Centaury, that is "just" 4,5 light years away from us (41.627.520.000.000 Km)? At the moment, interestellar journeys are simply science fiction, because if light takes 4.5 years to reach us from Proxima Centaury and we get barely a 0,004% of the lightspeed we would need a lot of generations to get there.

Here you have a very interesting data about distances and time of travel depending on the transport we could use to travel to the stars.